MT: I do write every day but not in the way you think. I’m living off writing right now and the way I’m doing that is by hustling a bunch of little articles. I write a ton of horoscopes, every week for the Guardian, and also for On Our Backs and Girlfriends and for another little magazine called SG Girl, which is a surfer girl magazine. The thing about our horoscopes, me and Jessica Lanyadoo, they actually are real horoscopes.

It’s a lot of work and I do a monthly column for the Guardian and I do a monthly column for a new San Francisco website called Beyond Chron. So that’s really weird to find that I finally am living off my writing, which is what you always think you’ll never be able to do, it’s your biggest dream and then you find out that it’s actually harder for you to work on your book than it was when you had some shitty job that you didn’t care about.

RKB: Since this is for Afterellen.com, which is a website about lesbians and bisexual women in pop culture, and I wanted to ask you about your memoirs. They sortof catapulted you into this fame and brought I think a sort of lesbian perspective to audiences that might never have read something like yours. Alternative audiences, but straighter, that might not be reading all the up and coming lesbian literature. Does that make you feel like you’re a spokesperson or do you ever feel like that’s put on you, by straight audiences saying “this is what every lesbian’s life is like?”

MT: I change names. When I was reading stuff on an open mic before I was ever published or had any connections to a publishing industry because I didn’t want it to feel like even within my tiny little world in San Francisco that I was getting up on stage and almost name dropping who I had hung out with or who I had gone home with. I never wanted to write anything that could be alienating. I wanted to tell the story and the story was best told if the characters were anonymous.

RKB: Do you change other things?

MT: I try to change a little bit of things to give people a little bit of anonymity, but the reality is that the things that make somebody compelling to write about are the things that are unique completely to them. So I could change somebody’s tattoos but their tattoos are totally captivating and interesting, or I could change what they do for a living but what they do for a living is so super weird and indicative of who they are.

RKB: Does that first person storytelling what comes most naturally? I’ve read your stuff in other anthologies that weren’t first person but still had that tone and style.

MT: I just feel really compelled to write about my own life. In the past when I’ve sat down to try to write fiction, I’m just frozen, I’m so blocked I don’t know where to start. Because basically there’s no limit, you can write anything, and I get agoraphobic in the face of that, I get paralyzed and I can’t write so. But I do feel really compelled to talk about what I see and what I’ve experienced and that material is write there, so why wouldn’t I turn to it, it’s the path of least resistance.

RKB: And in "Without a Net" and "Pills, Thrills," those are also mostly in that format.

MT: But my story in Pills is fiction.

RKB: I wasn’t sure.

MT: The main character’s name is Ronnie.

RKB: I thought maybe you changed it, it was hard to tell.

MT: The house that I was talking about in that story is a house I lived in, what’s happening in the house is not anything that ever happened. I’m starting to understand that that’s what fiction writers do too, they actually do base a lot of what they’re writing on on their real life and then take off with it, so that I’m understanding more.

RKB: Do you have anything you’re working on coming up besides "Rent Girl"?

MT: "Rent Girl"’s coming up, I have to figure out what my next project is. I’ve been wanting to write a science fiction novel.

RKB: You said that a lot of people assume that you went to college or assume things about your class background. Are there any other misconceptions that you feel might be out there that you want to counteract?

RKB: Does the process of writing it out and thinking it through so minutely, does that change you? Does that make you step back from it and say “this is what I’m like?”

MT: Oddly, I think it does the opposite. You do have to step back but I feel like in that stepping back you’re also writing this myth about yourself, and it can be dangerous because you can believe the myth that you’re writing about yourself. And you can think that you’ve really figured out who you are and you don’t realize that you did figure out who you are at that moment, but you’re going to change, because people just keep changing. So in a way it’s the opposite, I felt oddly trapped by who I thought I was in Valencia, and then when I did start to change, I became really foreign to myself because I had this idea of who I was in the world that ended up getting shattered.

RKB: Does it make it hard to have these books out there then?

MT: No, not if you make peace with who you’ve been and who you are and you’re comfortable with the whole process. There was a point when I did feel really uncomfortable. After Valencia came out and I started getting a lot of attention, and I had people coming up to me in bars and interacting with me in this way that they thought was appropriate because of what they’d read and it didn’t feel appropriate to me. It felt really uncomfortable so I felt really weird about the book for a little while, but I don’t anymore, I really love it now.